Expecting Innovation: experiences and expectations as foundation of research strategies in the German iron and steel industry during the 20th century

拟议的项目将处理德国钢铁工业在研究和开发支出方面所抱的各种期望。关于以科学为基础的工业，经济和商业史的重点主要集中在化学和电子技术上。然而，钢铁工业在世纪也投入了大量资金，以更好地了解影响钢铁生产和质量的冶金工艺。为此，钢铁工业不仅从1917年起资助了凯撒威廉研究所/马克斯普朗克铁研究所，而且还建立了一个紧密的企业研究设施网络，并与技术大学进行了密切合作。这个项目的主要任务是首先揭示导致公司投入大量资金进行此类研究的期望是什么，以及这些投资决策基于什么经验。例如，是化学工业令人印象深刻的成功导致钢铁工业做出类似的决定吗？或者是意识到现有的冶金知识基础不足以应对当代的各种挑战，从战时生产到二战后新兴的大众消费社会？其次，应确定企业为建立竞争优势而采用的研究战略，同时确定这些企业对与其他企业或科学机构进行频繁合作的期望。第三，第二次世界大战后，在欧洲煤钢共同体的层面上，可以看到相当多的跨国钢铁研究。在所有这三个层面上的问题是根本的，早期的经验如何形成对未来的钢铁和冶金研究的期望，这些期望是否已经转化为一个连贯的研究战略，以及他们是否适合各自公司的总体战略目标。

The proposed project shall deal with the wide array of expectations that the German iron and steel industry held in connection with its expenditures in research and development. In relation to the science-based industries, the focus of economic and business history lies mostly on the chemical and the electro-technical. Yet the steel industry also invested considerable funds during the 20th century in order to better understand the metallurgical processes that influenced the production and the quality of steel. To this end, the steel industry not only financed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute/Max Planck Institute for Iron Research from 1917 onwards, but also established a tight network of firm-based research facilities and cooperated intensively with technical universities. The main task of this project is to unravel, firstly, what the expectations were that led firms to devote huge amounts of money to this kind of research and upon what experiences these investment decisions were based. Was it, for instance, the impressive success of the chemical industry that led the iron and steel industry to similar decisions? Or was it the realisation that the existing metallurgical knowledge base was insufficient to meet the various contemporary challenges, from wartime production through to an emerging mass consumption society after World War II? Secondly, the research strategies used by firms to establish competitive advantages shall be identified and at the same time the expectations of these firms for the at times intense cooperation with other firms or scientific institutions. Thirdly, a considerable transnational steel research can be seen after World War II at the level of the European Coal and Steel Community. On all three levels the question is fundamental as to how earlier experiences formed expectations towards future steel and metallurgical research, whether these expectations have been transformed into a coherent research strategy and whether they fit into general strategic aims of the respective firms.